Eurasia after the Mongols

THOMAS T. ALLSEN

Reverberations from the Mongols' explosive expansion were felt across the entire continent. In England there was a fad for Tartar clothing and in Japan the thwarted Mongol invasions spawned the notion of kamikaze, the divine protective wind.

Yet, these dramatic events did not presage the reassertion of nomadic military power or the revival of the Chinggisid idea of steppe unity and universal empire. On the contrary, by the seventeenth century European observers were predicting the decline of the nomads and their subjugation by neighbouring sedentary states. And, in the eighteenth century, this came to pass. What follows is an attempt to explain how this happened and why.

Political devolution

In the middle of the thirteenth century, the high point of its unity and extent, the Empire of the Great Mongols held sway over the vast Eurasian steppe that stretched from the Black Sea to Siberia, Korea, Manchuria, North China, Tibet, South Siberia, East and West Turkestan, Iran, Iraq, Asia Minor, Caucasia, Crimea, Volga Bulgharia and Russia. Thereafter, expansion slowed as Chinggisid princes turned their energies inward in divisive civil wars. The result was the formation of four autonomous successor states in the decade following 1259, three of which, the Il-khans in Iran, the Chaghadai Khanate in Turkestan and the Yuan Dynasty in China, controlled extensive agricultural lands south of the steppe, while the fourth, the Golden Horde on the lower Volga, had its major holdings in the forest zone north of the steppe.

In each, direct descendants of Chinggis Khan continued to rule and con­tinued their struggles with one another. These conflicts, which lasted into the fourteenth century, were not, however, the only sources of their decline. The Il-khans collapsed in 1335 and the Yuan in 1368 largely as a consequence of court factionalism and the mismanagement of their agricultural populations. The Chaghadai Khanate fell in 1370 and a few decades later the Golden Horde entered an extended period of disintegration. In their case, growing internal discord was accelerated by external blows administered by Temur (also spelled Timur, and historically known as Tamerlane, d. 1405), whose devas­tating campaigns gave him control over most of the Chaghadai and Il-khan realms and fatally weakened the Golden Horde.

In the aftermath, integrated states, the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644) and the Timurids (also spelled Temurids, 1370 to 1506), came to power south of the steppe and in Moscovy to the north; but in the nomadic world the political situation was different, a kaleidoscope of ‘minimal states' perenni­ally in conflict. The fragmentation is fully apparent in the fifteenth century, which witnessed the emergence of many new polities and ethnicities in the steppe: the Crimean Khanate in the west, the Great Horde/Astrakhan Khanate on the lower Volga, the Kazan Khanate on the Kama, the Noghais on the Ural River, the Siberian Khanate on the Tobol, the three Kazakh Hordes in the central steppe and the Kirghiz in the southern Altai. The eastern steppe was similarly divided among shifting coalitions of northern (Khalkha), southern (Tumed and Chahar) and western (Oirat/Junghar/ Kalmyk) Mongols. The decentralization, however, did not end there; even during periods of ascendency, rulers' authority was limited and power over local populations was commonly in the hands of nominally subordinate leaders.

One source of this devolution, noticed by seventeenth-century Russian envoys, was the large number of claimants for leadership roles and the incessant succession struggles among them.^[150] The line of Batu Mongke, most powerful Mongol ruler of the day, well exemplifies the problem; throughout much of his reign (c.

The legacy in steppe and sown

Although the empire fell and the steppe fragmented, the Chinggisid idea survived. Great empires live on as models for successors, an ‘after-life' that constitutes an integral part of their history. The phenomenon of translatio imperii, the transfer of power from one dynasty or people to another, is a regular feature of the political history of Eurasia. The Mongols in this regard were quite typical; they appropriated the ideology and sacral territory of their Turkic predecessors, and those who followed laid claim to the Chinggisid legacy.

This legacy is best thought of as an attractive package of institutions, ideological precepts, symbols, ceremonies and territorial claims that could be adapted to local needs and circumstances. In the Mongol case, its attractive­ness is closely related to the size of their empire, which was approximately four times larger than any predecessor, a quantum leap in scale that contem­poraries could only account for in terms of special cosmic or heavenly dispensations. And, given the diversity of their subjects and vastness of their holdings, they developed a wide array of governing techniques for successors to consider. The choices made were, of course, always selective and subject to reinterpretation.

The Mongols, naturally, made extensive use of this inheritance. When ousted from China, the Mongol court retreated into the steppe where descendants of Khubilai (r. 1260 to 1296) established the Later Yuan. In subsequent centuries, other Chinggisids, including Batu Mongke and his progeny, dominated the chaotic political life of Eastern and Southern Mongolia. In Moghulistan and later in Kashgar, a similar monopoly prevailed; here lineal descendants of Chaghadai (r.

In such environments, non-Chinggisids had to fashion new political strat­egies. The solutions they developed, while acknowledging the Chinggisid principle in theory, undermined it in practice. The history of the Temurids illustrates the process. Reared in the Mongol tradition, Temur felt compelled to rule through puppets and manufacture Chinggisid descent through his maternal line, all the while proclaiming himself a dutiful imperial son-in-law (kuregen) restoring the Mongol Empire on behalf of its rightful rulers. But even Temur, ruling over settled Muslim populations, had recourse to Islamic forms of legitimation. His heirs gave these forms greater emphasis; they abandoned Chinggisid figureheads, relying instead on their founding father's charisma, derived from his spectacular conquests in Central and West Asia. In these parts, the Temurid principle came to rival the Chinggisid for about a century.

The erosion is noticeable, too, in the western steppe. Among the succes­sors of the Golden Horde some ruling houses could boast Chinggisid lineages, but others could not. Lacking these credentials, both the Noghai Tatars and the Taybughid Dynasty, founders of the Siberian Khanate, made heavy use of Islam in their search for legitimacy, ignoring and in some cases openly challenging the Chinggisid principle.^[151] The same lack confronted the rulers of the last great power in steppe history, the Junghars of Western Mongolia, who turned to Buddhism for ideological support. Their most powerful khan, Galdan (r. 1676 to 1697), was confirmed in office by the Fifth Dalai Lama as a promoter and defender of the faith.

Ideologies from the sedentary world of sown agriculture had greatly altered the forms of legitimacy in the steppe, which, by the eighteenth century, was divided between Mongolian-speaking Buddhists in the east and Turkic-speaking Muslims in the west. The transformation, a slow, incremental process, can be explained by the interplay of a number of forces set in motion during the empire: the Mongols' exposure to the beliefs of subject populations; their general tolerance in religious matters, which allowed princely lines to follow their personal preferences; their patronage of religious institutions and grants of immunity to clerical classes, which attracted missionaries to their courts; their close involvement with long­distance merchants who were normally adherents of world religions; and their forcible transfer of entire communities, mainly Muslim, into eastern Inner Asia.

The resulting changes in the religious landscape of the steppe were profound, strikingly different from the conditions that obtained on the eve of the Mongol unification. Then, all nomads from Manchuria to the Black Sea shared a common repertoire of religious-ideological concepts - heavenly mandates, universal empire and special good fortune that ensured leaders' success. Now, however, these ideas were increasingly challenged, diluted or displaced by world religions that were exclusive and hostile to one another.

There were many sources of antagonism: differences in doctrine, such as Buddhist notions of reincarnation and Muslim abhorrence of idolatry, as well as in daily practice, including matters of ritual cleanliness and food preparation. The growing tension is reflected in Muslim historiography of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, which portrays the Junghars (called Kalmyks) as alien and threatening, perennial enemies to be defeated and converted. Similar sentiments are expressed in the oral epics of Kazakhs and Kirghiz, which took their present form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of their wars with the Junghar; in these, Kalmyks are castigated for their cruelty and treachery and ridiculed for their ugliness and incomprehensible language.

This is not to argue that religion was the major cause of conflict in the steppe. There were still rivalries generated by raiding and competition over pasture, booty and markets; these, however, took on a distinct religious colouration in the course of the endless clashes between Buddhist and Muslim nomads. As a result, communal identities hardened and became an additional ethnic marker for both Turks and Mongols.

The growing religious divide undercut prospects for nomadic unity in yet another way. In the steppe, the process of state formation always involved the reworking of shared mythologies of origins and descent. In the post­Mongol era, however, alternative political myths and models gained cur- rency.^[152] Tibetan spiritual advisers transformed Chinggis Khan and his succes­sors into Chakravartins, ‘Universal Emperors', making them heirs of ancient Indian-Buddhist or Chinese royal lines, while Muslim scholars situated Turkic dynasties within the Biblical and Iranian traditions and provided them with genealogical ties to Muslim royal lines.

Although more selective, the Mongols' sedentary successors also mined this legacy. The Ming Dynasty, whose emergence is usually understood as a nativistic reaction to nomadic rule, embraced elements of this inheritance. In the first place, the Ming court authorized an official history of the Yuan, thereby formally acknowledging the Mongols' place in the orthodox line (zhengtong) of Chinese dynasties. Further, their engagement with their Yuan predecessor was widely felt in art, personnel policies, military institutions and court culture. And their successors, the Manchu-Qing dynasty (1644 to 1911), who were much more attuned to Inner Asian traditions, appropriated many Mongol institutions, symbols, titles and political-ideological concepts and made extensive use of co-opted Chinggisids in their relations with Inner Asian peoples.

More consequentially, the Yuan, by its conquests and unification of the multi-state system then prevailing in East Asia, helped fashion the modern notion of the ‘proper' territorial configuration of the Chinese state. This conception of China, reinforced by the Manchu-Qing conquests, was embraced by modern nationalists and, with the exception of Outer Mongolia, was fully realized.^[153]

The use of Chinggisid precedents to justify territorial expansion is common to all successor states. TheJalayirids (1336 to 1432), who supplanted the Mongols in Azerbaijan, used their control of Tabriz, the Il-khan capital, to affirm their legitimacy and to counter claims of rivals. And for the princes of Muscovy, the seizure of Golden Horde territories along the Volga in the 1550s signalled their elevation from principality to empire, one headed by a tsar, a title heretofore reserved for Chinggisids; this is why Ivan IV (r. 1533 to 1584) always insisted that European rulers include ‘Tsar of Kazan and Astrakhan' in his titles.

The Moscovite embrace of the Mongol legacy, like that of others, was fraught with contradiction. While the Moscovite princes justified their authority over Christian subjects in purely Christian terms, they played by Chinggisid rules in the steppe. In the fourteenth century, Moscovite court chronicles excoriate Temur and others for attempting to usurp power from legitimate Chinggisid rulers of the Golden Horde, their sovereigns and benefactors.^[154] A century later, when Muscovy achieved a measure of inde­pendence, the rulers maintained a large stable of ‘tame' Chinggisid princes in the satellite Kasimov Khanate (c. 1450 to 1681), whom they used to influence and divide Tatar rivals.^[155] And on one famous occasion, they even played a Chinggisid card in their own domain. In 1575, Ivan IV suddenly ‘abdicated' and temporarily ruled through a Chinggisid puppet, the Kasimov prince Simeon Bekbulatovich, a practice that had clear precedent in the Golden Horde. While such policies perplexed European contemporaries, they played well in the steppe, where Moscovite (and later Romanov) rulers were regularly styled Chaghan Khans, ‘White or Western Khans', and accepted as legitimate successors of the Golden Horde.

The Moscovites' familiarity with nomadic tradition was a consequence of their deep involvement in steppe politics dating back to 1327, when Ivan I became the Horde's chief fiscal agent in the Russian principalities. Exploit­ing this office, their rulers achieved predominance over rivals and began ‘gathering up the Russian lands', a task which entailed conflict with states on their western frontier. But once this was in hand, they turned their attention to Tatar polities in the east.

Geopolitical realignment

Kazan, conquered in 1552, is significant because it was Muscovy's first major acquisition of Golden Horde territory. But the Muscovite annexation of the Astrakhan Khanate in 1556, usually mentioned as a sidelight, is equally consequential because the ‘conquest of the Volga' meant that for the first time a sedentary power had a permanent presence in the political heartland of the western steppe. While Moscow's line of communication with Astra­khan was sometimes precarious, Russian rulers nonetheless transformed it into a formidable outpost able to withstand major assaults.

Their control of the Volga, and later the Terek, enabled the Russians to exert considerable influence over the nomads, first the Noghais and later the Kalmyks, a disgruntled segment of the Oirat/Junghars who migrated west in the 1620s. From these riverine outposts, the Russians kept careful watch on the nomads and by means of diplomacy, coercion, economic aid and bribery tried to control their migratory movements and political associations. Their success in doing so was facilitated by the divisions among the nomads and by the Russian policy of allowing allies and clients internal autonomy, a measure that made it easier to co-opt steppe elites.

The motives behind Moscow's forward policy in the steppe are not hard to discern - the quest for territory, resources, markets and security. Among the latter were serious concerns about population loss. With the spread of Islam in the western steppe, the slave trade in the Black Sea region shifted attention from the nomads to the peoples of the forest. From the late fourteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, Russia was a major target, losing tens of thou­sands of subjects to the Crimean Tatars. Their raids, the largest slaving operation prior to the Atlantic trade, constituted a continuous demographic drain on the Russian state.

The response was twofold: freeing Christians from Tatar captivity became government policy and extensive new defensive works were prepared. These included the fortification of major cities and lengthy defensive lines (cherty) along the frontier composed of watchtowers, forts, abatis and ditches to slow down and give early warning of Tatar attacks. Starting in the sixteenth century, new lines were built, pushing the Russian frontier southward out of the forest zone into the steppe, which they penetrated along the major rivers and their tributaries, gradually enclosing and transforming rich pasture land into productive cropland.^[156]

It was this intensified competition with successors of the Golden Horde that led to Russia's renewed interest in Siberia. The drive beyond the Urals was initiated by private interests and Cossack irregulars, but once the Siber­ian Khanate was vanquished in the 1580s, Moscovite officials arrived on the scene and henceforth new conquests were conducted in the name of the tsar. Driven by the allure of furs and prospects of trade, the Russian advance was rapid. Using the river systems and portages, secured with fortified trading posts (ostrog), the Russians reached the Pacific in 1639. Their primary axis of advance was the taiga, the belt of coniferous forests between the tundra and the steppe, an environment to which the Russian system of extensive woodland agriculture, which combined readily with cattle raising, hunting and fishing, was well adapted. The relative ease of conquest is attributable to their technological and organizational superiority, the lack of coordinated resistance among the Siberian natives and their susceptibility to introduced diseases, which so reduced their numbers that by 1700 Slavic-speaking colonists were in the majority. On the whole, the acquisition of this vast territory was accomplished rapidly and cheaply, a very profitable venture requiring limited investment from the centre.

When, however, the Russians reached East Asia in the early seventeenth century, they encountered an opponent they could not overpower or intimi­date, the Ming Dynasty. Even though weakened and in the final decades of its existence, the Ming easily kept the Russians at arm's length. Their approach to interstate relations had not always been so defensive. During its early years, the Ming pursued more aggressive policies towards its northern neighbours, launching several major campaigns into Mongolia. While these blunted the nomad threat, they did not eliminate it and the costs proved prohibitive. The result was the building of the Great Wall and the use of attractive trade and tributary privileges to buy off Mongol rulers. By these means, the Ming managed to fend off the nomads but never subdue them.

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7.i The expansion of Russia

But where the Ming failed, the Manchus succeeded, becoming the first sedentary power to subjugate, reorganize and administer the eastern steppe. Their efforts began a decade before their conquest of China. Seeking add­itional manpower, the Manchus induced the southern Mongols to accept their suzerainty in 1634 to 1636. Following submission, they were incorpor­ated into the Manchu military banner system, which effectively segregated them from their northern kin, creating the current political division between Inner and Outer Mongolia.

The northern Mongols retained their independence until 1691, when growing fear of the Junghars persuaded their leaders to accept Qing protec­tion. Once in command, the Manchus isolated the Khalkhas and introduced the banner system; in all, they formed eighty-six such military-administrative units, each with a defined territory and assigned population, and each headed by a hereditary princely line, eighty-two of which were Chinggisids. There­after, the Qing court took care to monitor their succession and maintain their loyalty and obedience. In their use of ritualized gift exchange, royal hunts, imperial banquets and progresses to periodically renew and affirm their personal ties to the emperor, the Manchus followed age-old patterns of Inner Asian statecraft.^[157]

Manchu policy in the north did not neglect the forest peoples. In their rise to power, the Manchus first subjugated the populations of southern and central Manchuria and later extended their control into the Amur basin. This brought them in direct contact with the advancing Russians, producing tensions and clashes that were resolved in 1689 by the Treaty of Nerchinsk. By its provisions, Russia, in return for trade relations and representation in Beijing, vacated the Amur watershed and recognized Mongolia as a Manchu sphere of interest. This allowed the Manchus to concentrate on their one remaining rival in Inner Asia, the Junghar Khanate.

The western Mongols, who formed the core of this state, have a some­what shadowy history. Under the name Oirat, they fashioned a powerful confederation in the early fifteenth century, which soon broke apart due to internal fissures. Thereafter, although nominally reconstituted, it remained a very loose confederation into the seventeenth century. In the view of some scholars, the Junghar Empire only comes into being under Galdan, who successfully warred with the Kazakhs, seized the agricultural lands of East Turkestan in 1678 and defeated the Khalkhas in 1688.

The Manchu response was measured, if not hesitant; in the end, it took several campaigns into Mongolia and civil war among the Junghars before they vanquished Galdan's forces in 1696. Despite the setback, the Khanate survived under Galdan's nephew and rival, Tsewang Rabdan (r. 1697 to 1727). Although still regarded as a great power, their reputation proved illusory. The ethnic composition of their state was one underlying weaknesses. Individual Muslims served the Junghars as court merchants, diplomats and local officials, but the agricultural population of East Turkestan became increasingly restive under their authority, expressing their discontent in open rebellion and flight into Qing territory. Furthermore, there were no Muslim nomads in their armies; true, they defeated Kazakhs and Kirghiz and occa­sionally formed alliances with them, but never managed to integrate non­Buddhist steppe peoples into their state. Even more telling, however, is their failure to incorporate other western Mongols, the Volga Kalmyks and Qinghai Oirats, into their empire.

Until the 1740s, the Qing court held a monolithic view of the Junghars, but in the next decade began to realize the extent of their divisions from the steady stream of defectors asking for asylum. Renewed military pressure, it was now thought, could bring about their dissolution into four separate and subservient khanates. But their weaknesses were greater than estimated and Junghar resistance collapsed under the massive Manchu assault. Even the revolt of the Khalkhas, reacting to heavy Qing demands for military service, corvee and taxes, could not save the situation and in 1757 the Junghar forces went down in defeat. Following victory, the Qing armies instituted an extermination campaign in the conquered land; contemporaries estimated that these organized massacres, in combination with flight and epidemic disease, reduced the population of Jungharia by 90 per cent.

The Junghar wars were a pivotal event in the subjugation of the steppe peoples. The threat they posed induced the Khalkhas to submit to the Manchus in 1691 and the Kazakhs to seek closer relations with the Russians after 1730. While both powers made good use of these opportunities, their goals and tactics in the steppe differed appreciably.

The Manchus pursued a policy of divide and direct rule; they reconfigured and registered their nomadic subjects, restricted their movements and inter­vened in their legal disputes. The Russians, with more modest objectives, pursued a policy of influence and indirect rule, using policies first developed west of the Urals. Under their system of protectorates, the tsars exacted an oath of allegiance (shert') from Kazakh khans, confirmed them in office, co­opted them for limited service to the Empire, but otherwise permitted them

7.2 The Qing Empire

wide latitude in the conduct of internal affairs. And, although they encour­aged the formation of a fourth, Inner Kazakh Horde in 1801, the Russians were generally content to maintain pre-existing political divisions in the central and western steppe.

The military policies of the two also differed. The Manchus subdued the Mongols by force and threat of force and occupied the eastern steppe, thereby rendering the Great Wall obsolete. The Russians, in contrast, continued to invest in fortifications, establishing a defensive line (Iiniia) of watchtowers and pickets along the steppe frontier to screen Siberia from the nomads. By the early eighteenth century, the line extended from the Ural River into the central steppe and, following the Treaty of Kiakhta, 1727, across the entire Russian-Mongol frontier. Like the earlier cherty, the Iiniia provided intelligence, advanced warning of attacks, raised the cost of raiding and slowly encroached upon the steppe.

But however different their policies, the end result was the same: ‘free nomads' of the open steppe, who negotiated access to seasonal pastures and migratory routes with other nomads, were progressively transformed into ‘enclosed nomads', forced to negotiate such rights with sedentary states.

Military balance

New developments in weapons technology and the conduct of war also hastened the end of nomadic dominance. Their long-standing advantage over the sedentary peoples of sown agriculture was based on a number of factors. Most fundamentally, nomads had much lower military costs; their equipment and mounts played a productive role in their herder-hunter mode of resource extraction and they could mobilize most of the adult male population without serious harm to their pastoral economy. In combination this made raiding and warfare a sound and attractive investment.^[158] And, once in the field, they enjoyed another set of advantages: mobility, tactical flexi­bility, skill in horsemanship and weaponry, a sense of solidarity rooted in beliefs about common ancestry and the ability to concentrate forces.

To counter this threat, sedentary peoples recruited nomads as march wardens and trained their own troops in steppe methods of warfare. Russia did both; they acquired effective and loyal Tatar auxiliaries and developed an army on their southern frontier, mainly cavalry that specialized in fending off nomadic incursions. On their western borderlands, however, they faced a different kind of enemy, one that increasingly relied on firearms and infantry. The Russians therefore endeavoured to keep apace of Europe's ongoing military revolution and in the process gained a measure of self-sufficiency and equality. Thus, while Russia was a borrower, not an innovator, she did obtain a technological edge over her nomadic rivals.

Although the new weapons were not decisive in steppe warfare, they enabled the Russians to better defend their cities and frontier fortifications and allowed them to overwhelm the hunter-gatherers of Siberia. As a result of these experiences, the Russians came to believe that their firearms and artillery were far superior to those of actual and potential enemies in Inner Asia. That their perception was correct is affirmed by the attitude of steppe rulers they encountered: all, without exception, held Russian weaponry in high regard, repeatedly requesting gunpowder, weapons and gunsmiths from the tsarist government.¹⁰ The Russians occasionally responded with limited diplomatic gifts to favoured rulers, but otherwise placed strict con­trols on the sale of firearms, powder and lead to the nomads.

The nomads knew how to make gunpowder and some, the Junghars, founded their own cannon, utilizing captured European technicians. But even with these measures they could not keep up and the weapons gap, both qualitatively and quantitatively, continued to widen. And they fared no better further east, where the Manchus sent large military forces into the steppe. They were victorious in their campaigns against the Junghars because they had larger armies, better balanced and integrated forces of infantry, artillery and cavalry, and more abundant European-style firearms.

In the view of some scholars, as long as the nomads' weaponry was equivalent to that of their sedentary opponents, their mobility and tactics gave them a decided advantage that lasted for several millennia, an advantage that came to an end with the development and spread of firearms.11 Their argument is persuasive but incomplete; there was another, less noticed change underway. The balance of horse power that long favoured the nomads also eroded in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By means of improved domestic production and trade arrangements, the Manchus and Russians secured military mounts in sufficient numbers to successfully challenge the nomads on their home ground.¹²

The chronology of this shift can be formulated as follows: the Qing victory over Galdan in 1696 marks the beginning of the end, their crushing defeat of

10

11

12

See, e.g., Henry Serruys, ‘Three Mongol Documents from 1635 in the Russian Arch­ives', Central Asiatic Journal 7 (1962), 3 and 21.

L. S. Stavrianos, Lifelines from Our Past: A New World History (Armonk, NY: M. and E. Sharpe, 1992), pp. 84-6; and William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 60.

S. A. M. Adshead, ‘Horse Administration under the Ch'ing', Papers on Far Eastern History 17 (1978), 71-9; and Jos Gommans, ‘Warhorse and Post-Nomadic Empire in Asia, c. 1000-1800', Journal of Global History 2 (2007), 1-21.

the Junghars in 1757 constitutes the climactic test of arms and two events in its aftermath provide final proof that the nomads were a spent force.

The first occurred in 1771, when some 150,000 Volga Kalmyks, fearful of further Russian encroachment on their pastures and interference in their internal affairs, set out for their depopulated Jungharian homeland. The Qing court accepted the 50,000 who survived the trek and the Kazakh depreda­tions, assigned them territories and formed them into banners. What is most striking about this event is its west-to-east direction, reversing the predomin­ant east-to-west pattern of migration of previous centuries. The last time this occurred was the early thirteenth century, when the Chinggisids dispatched nomads from the western steppe to China for military service. The differ­ence, of course, is that nomads were now at the beck and call of sedentary empires.

The second was the Russians' defeat of the Crimean Tatars in 1783. These long-time clients of the Ottomans were the last hold-outs, and once the brief campaign ended, the Russians were in control of the entire western steppe. It is noteworthy, too, that immediately after victory the Russians rounded up 6,000 Noghais in the Crimea, had them swear allegiance to Catherine II and then celebrated the occasion with a great feast at which the new subjects of the crown consumed 100 oxen, 800 sheep and 500 buckets of vodka, a fitting demonstration of the Russians' command of the steppe and its political culture.¹³

In hindsight, this certainly marks the end, but when was this realized by the sedentary powers? Russia's reorganization of its military in the early eighteenth century to fight European-style armies tells us that in their calculations the age-old nomadic threat had been reduced to a police prob­lem. For the Qing, the realization came later; it took Manchu and Chinese statesmen nearly a century to adjust to the new realities and to come to terms with the threat posed by European maritime power.

Economic containment

The occupation of the taiga by the Russians and Manchus dramatically transformed the geopolitical environment of Inner Asia. How this affected the balance of power between nomadic and settled peoples requires a brief examination of Siberia's place in steppe history. ^{[159] [160]}

All major nomadic empires, Xiongnu, Turk, Uighur and Mongol, took an active interest in Siberia; indeed, one of the initial and crucial steps in the rise of each was the subjugation of the forest zone. Imperial founders, even mythical ones in epic traditions, follow the same policy: they first dispose of rivals in the steppe, then campaign in the north and lastly turn attention to agricultural lands in the south. There were sound reasons for this strategy.

The territories to the north of the steppe, unlike those to the south, were generally stateless, offering soft frontiers and political space for successful nomadic rulers as well as a refugium for the unsuccessful. Once, however, the Russians and Manchus came to terms at Nerchinsk and Kiakhta, this formerly open frontier was closed, with dire consequences for the nomads. For one thing, close attention was now paid to the movement of runaways and refugees crossing demarcated and policed borders, an issue that came up frequently in Russian-Manchu diplomacy. For another, the southern portions of the taiga, though not densely populated, offered productive recruiting grounds, which the Chinggisids eagerly and systematically exploited in search of military manpower. By the seventeenth century, however, the Russians and Manchus were recruiting these same populations as auxiliaries and border guards, measures that enabled them to contest the nomads' access to the abundant economic resources of the taiga.

From the military perspective, the most important of these was iron. Not only was Siberia rich in ores, it also contained early centres of iron-working. For the nomads, this was a primary source of war materiel, made all the more vital by the policy of southern rivals to prohibit the export of iron into the steppe. The Russians, too, adopted similar policies and from the begin­ning of their eastward expansion took over existing mines and opened up new ones. While their development was slow and inefficient, this nonethe­less had the effect of denying the nomads a vital strategic commodity.

The Russian advance similarly limited the nomads' access to luxury and prestige goods so profitable in long-distance trade and so necessary for state formation. Of these, furs, collected forcibly from the forest peoples, were the most desirable. The Russians therefore strove to monopolize the tribute (iasak) formerly paid to the nomads. Such control was a major objective in their conflict with the Siberian Khanate; and, as they moved eastward, there was continuing competition with other steppe peoples over the right to impose iasak in the taiga, competitions the Russians eventually won.

The emergence of new tributary relationships and markets in Inner Asia raises the much debated question of the impact of European maritime expansion and seaborne trade on the inland caravan system. The nomads, to be sure, patronized and benefited from long-distance trade. Their returns, both luxuries and necessities, were then redistributed among their nomadic subjects. Without external resources, nascent steppe states lacked the ability to attract substantial followings or create permanent political institutions. Thus, the political economy of the steppe was sensitive to changes in transcontinental exchange networks. In light of these considerations, there is a certain appeal to the theory that Ottoman expansion in the Black Sea in the late fifteenth century followed by European maritime expansion into the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth combined to divert trade from the overland routes, turning Inner Asia into a commercial and political backwater.

But while plausible, this line of argument is open to a number of criti­cisms. First of all, the spice/drug trade that first attracted the Portuguese eastward was mainly seaborne, and had been for centuries, so it is hard to see how Europe's arrival in the Indian Ocean could have diverted traffic from overland routes. This conclusion is reinforced by recent research on the timing of European impact on Asian maritime trade; many now believe its influence was not felt until the early eighteenth century and that its range was restricted to the southern littoral of Asia. Further, since there is little concrete data on the volume and profitability of overland trade during the Mongol era, the presumed golden age, there is no statistical basis for establishing and measuring its later ‘decline'. And, when we finally have such data, from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the presumed ‘age of decadence', it reveals lively and extensive commercial exchange throughout Inner Asia. Finally, the caravan merchants' rapid response to the emerging opium market in China strongly suggests that the overland routes remained viable and competitive into the early nineteenth century.

It is true, of course, that there were periodic downturns in commercial activity, usually tied to political-military disturbances. But such disturbances were a recurrent feature of steppe history, including the Mongol period. Caution is therefore required in handling this kind of data, since what often passes as evidence for systemic decline may only be the downside of shorter- term economic cycles.¹⁴

Still, a case can be made that in the post-Mongol era the nomads' share in overland trade declined, not as a consequence of the rise of European maritime powers, but of the commercial interests and practices of neighbouring

1 ⁴ R. J. Barendse, ‘Trade and State in the Arabian Seas: A Survey from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries', Journal of World History 11 (2000), 224. land powers. Their encroachment, which disrupted older patterns of commercial traffic in the steppe, begins in the mid-sixteenth century, with Moscow's conquest of the lower Volga, long the nexus of north-south and east-west exchange in western Eurasia. In Russian hands, Astrakhan became a major entrepot, attracting nomads as well as international traders from Transcaucasia, Persia, Central Asia and India. Like their nomadic predeces­sors, the Russian authorities encouraged these merchants to form permanent settlements which they then monitored, licensed and taxed.

In time, this growth in trade stimulated Russian interest in more distant markets and their own merchants came to play an active role in Central Asian trade in direct competition with those of the nomads. This becomes apparent once the Russians crossed the Urals and revived an older east-west route through southern Siberia that had flourished under the Mongols.¹⁵ The way, of course, was long and arduous but nonetheless a viable alternative, since the Russian Government provided authorized merchants, Christian and Muslim, with protection and absorbed some of their transportation costs.

In accessing the extent of this transformation, there is a major perceptual problem to overcome, the ‘silk road syndrome', our fixation on east-west exchange. Before, during and after the Mongol Empire there was an active north-south exchange, one that the Russians exploited early on and ultim­ately came to dominate with the growth of Orenburg and other frontier markets in Siberia. It is therefore arguable that the most profound change in the commercial life of Inner Asia during the post-Mongol period was not a decline in volume, but a reorientation in direction.

Control over these routes and markets, both old and new, gave the Russians added leverage in inter-regional and transcontinental trade. So, too, did their imposition of state monopolies on commodities from Siberian furs to Chinese rhubarb, monopolies that were partially replaced in the eighteenth century by state-backed charter companies enjoying exclusive commercial rights in Central Asia and China. The combined effect of these policies was to reduce the nomads' share in the proceeds of long-distance trade. But it did more than this: over several centuries, the nomads became dependent on Russian products and markets, a trend first noticeable in their relations with the Noghais around Astrakhan. In the central steppe, Russian frontier posts became magnets for the Kazakhs and Kirghiz; here, they traded livestock and hides for agricultural and manufacturing goods.

1 ⁵ For a description, see RobertJ. Kerner, The Urge to the Sea: The Course of Russian History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1946), pp. 165-72.

This represents a complete reversal of traditional exchange between the steppe and Siberia; the nomads no longer enjoyed an asymmetrical relation­ship with the forest peoples, one based on coerced extraction of tribute, and now had to barter goods in Russian markets, an arena in which they were the disadvantaged party. The great disparity between the size and productivity of the Russian economy and those of the steppe polities institutionalized this dependency. By the eighteenth century, the Russians had the ability, which they regularly used, to squeeze or reward the nomads and thus the ability to exert substantial influence, and a measure of control, over the political life of the steppe.

Something similar happened in Mongolia, the unplanned consequence of two Manchu policies. First, they effectively isolated the Khalkhas from Russian influence, and then during the Junghar wars brought many Chinese merchants into Mongolia for logistical support. Once in residence, and without outside competition, they soon dominated exchange throughout the region. They sold goods to Mongol princes and herders on time and the usurious rates charged kept the buyers perpetually in debt. Again, this represents a dramatic reversal. For most of steppe history merchants were the allies and partners of the nomads, helping them extract wealth from the sedentary world through trade, tribute and tax-farming arrangements; now most merchants operating in and around the steppe were agents of sedentary powers helping them control and exploit exchange within the nomadic world.¹⁶

Global contexts

The foregoing analysis does not mean that the demise of the nomads was solely a product of forces originating in the territories of the former Mongol Empire; external forces produced by fundamental shifts in global political and economic history were also in play. In the most general terms, the nomads were victims of sedentary competitors better positioned to benefit from emerging world exchange networks. Even land-locked Moscovy was connected. In 1478, Ivan III seized Novgorod and established beneficial commercial relations with Europe through the Hanse, and in 1553, just before Ivan IV seized Astrakhan, these ties were reinforced by the arrival of the English and Dutch in Arkhangelsk.

1 ⁶ On this issue, see G. L. Penrose, ‘Inner Asian Influences on the Earliest Russo-Chinese Trade and Diplomatic Contacts', Russian History/Histoire russe 19 (1992), 361-92.

But wider commercial reach was not their only advantage. Sedentary states had greater opportunity to tap into global information networks and greater capacity to exploit new knowledge and technology. Their imper­sonal, bureaucratic systems of government, in contrast to the more volatile personal, patrimonial regimes in the steppe, gave them better administrative control over resources and their improved logistical and financial skills allowed them to maintain and direct larger, more complex military machines using gunpowder weaponry. They had a staying power and a measure of continuity in policy that nomad polities could not match.¹⁷

The extent to which global environmental forces were felt in the steppe is unknown. Purely natural phenomena, such as the disturbed climatic condi­tions found in many regions of the world during the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, have yet to be scientifically documented for Inner Asia.1⁸ We are somewhat better informed on human-induced environmental change. For the peoples of the steppe, the balance sheet of the ‘Columbian Exchange' was singularly negative. There were no new animal species to increase product­ivity of their herds, while the new plant species served to increase agricul­tural productivity and sustain rapid demographic growth in the settled zones of Eurasia, most spectacularly in Qing China, whose population doubled during the eighteenth century.

The only part of the exchange in which the nomads participated was the spread of tobacco-smoking and new diseases, principally syphilis and small­pox. While it seems evident that the introduction of smallpox into the steppe in the sixteenth century added to the general instability and frequency of succession disputes since it targeted elites in contact with sedentary peoples, we do not know what role it played in the often hypothesized demographic decline of the Mongols over the last several centuries.¹⁹ In any event, it can hardly be doubted that in the post-Columbian era the population of the sown was growing at a far faster rate than that of the steppe.

Only after we have far more data on the environmental history of Inner Asia will we be able to adequately gauge the balance of internal and external

1 ⁷ To my knowledge, this perspective was first suggested by Andrew Hess, ‘The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517) and the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century World War', International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973), 58. Recently, more comprehensive frameworks for the comparative study of Eurasian history have been developed by Victor Lieberman and Peter Perdue - see Further Reading.

1 ⁸ Such studies are now underway. See Mara Hvistendahl, ‘Roots of Empire', Science 337 (2012), 1596-9.

1 ⁹ Henry Serruys, ‘Smallpox in Mongolia during the Ming and Ch'ing Dynasties', Zen- Cralasiatische Studien 14 (1980), 41-63.

forces that quelled the nomads. In the present state of our knowledge all that can be can said is that while global influences were present, the immediate agents of the nomads' demise were two land-based empires with closer ties to the continental heartland than to the maritime rimland.

Conclusions

The political fragmentation of the nomads in the post-Mongol era was the norm in steppe history. The Chinggisid unification was the exception, so exceptional that it created a lasting legacy in both steppe and sown. This unparalleled success invested their line with a special charisma and a widely acknowledged claim on legitimacy, qualities that also made the empire's institutions and political culture attractive to successors.

At the same time, the legacy contributed to the nomads' later division and weakness. The displacement of indigenous political doctrines by imported ideologies from the sown and the attenuation of the principle of Chinggisid descent by the proliferation of claimants in the steppe can be traced back to Mongol imperial policies and practices. These divisions, found across the steppe, proved fatal in the long-term competition with politically integrated sedentary rivals.

Their growing vulnerability was exposed by Russia's advance eastward and her takeover of Tatar-Mongol tributary relations with Siberian peoples, which in turn provoked the Manchu occupation of the Amur basin. While there was no master plan or strategic vision underlying the Russians' actions, their demarcation and control of the forest zone transformed the geopolitical envir­onment of Inner Asia and brought about a discontinuity in steppe history.

For the first time, the steppe faced major powers along its forest frontier, powers possessing new weapons technology that enhanced their defensive capability and reduced the return on nomadic military ventures. This, too, was part of the Chinggisid legacy, for it was the Mongols who initially diffused and demonstrated gunpowder, a Chinese invention, throughout Eurasia; and when, following successful attempts at replication in other parts of the continent, it returned to Inner Asia, it did so in new, improved forms and in the hands of the Russians and Manchus.

The loss of their military supremacy together with the commercial policies of the Russians and Manchus also ended the nomads' dominance of overland trade; by their joint closure of the forest frontier, they limited the nomads' access to external resources so crucial to their political economy. Steppe resources alone cannot sustain steppe polities.

The emergence of a global system of exchange, fashioned by the maritime powers of the Far West, served to extend and consolidate the growing disparity between the power potential of the sown and the steppe, since the nomads, unlike their principal sedentary protagonists, were only indir­ectly and intermittently connected to these networks.

To sum up, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols mobilized resources from steppe and sown to subjugate most of Eurasia. In the eighteenth century, the Russians and Manchus used the same formula to subjugate the nomads.

FURTHBR RBADING

Basin, V. IA., Rossiia i kazakhskie khanstva v XVI-XVIII vv (Alma-Ata: Nauka, 1971). Bergholz, Fred W., The Partition of the Steppe: The Struggle of the Russians, Manchus, and the Zunghar Mongolsfor Empire in Central Asia, 1619-1758 (New York: Peter Lang, 1993).

Dale, Stephen F., Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1994).

DeWeese, Devin, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

Di Cosmo, Nicola, Allen J. Frank and Peter B. Golden (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Dmytryshyn, Basil, E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan (eds and trans.), The Russian Conquest of Siberia, 1558-1700, A Documentary Record (Portland, OR: The Press of the Oregon Historical Society, 1985), vol. 1.

Khazanov, Anatoly M., Nomads and the Outside World, 2nd edn (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

Khodarkovsky, Michael, Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500-1800 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002).

Levi, Scott, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Lieberman, Victor, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context (Cambridge University Press, 2009), vol. 2.

Mancall, Mark, Russia and China: Their Diplomatic Relations to 1728 (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

Manz, Beatrice Forbes, Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Pelenski, Jaroslaw, Russia and Kazan: Conquest and Imperial Ideology (1438-1560s) (Paris: Mouton, 1974).

Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Serruys, Henry, Sino-Mongol Relations during the Ming (Brussels: Institut belge des hautes etudes chinoises, 1967), vol. 2.

Stevens, Carol Belkin, Soldiers of the Steppe: Army Reform and Social Change in Early Modern Russia (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 1995).

Struve, Lynn A. (ed.), The Qing Transformation in World Historical Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004).

Subtelny, Maria E., Timurids in Transition (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

Sunderland, Willard, Taming the Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).

Ziiaev, Kh. Z., Ekonomicheskie sviazi Srednei Azii s Sibir'iu v XVI-XIX vv. (Tashkent: Fan, 1983).

Zlatkin, I. IA., Istoriia dzhungarskogo khanstva, 1635-1758, 2nd edn (Moscow: Nauka, 1983).

Continuity and change in the Indian Ocean basin

JOS GOMMANS

Geographic categories like ‘Europe' or ‘Asia' hardly qualify as a canvas on which to paint an adequate picture of the historical developments in the early modern period. Even though we can still discuss the revolutionary process of European expansion in the area that is now called Asia, it was only after our period that a sharp dichotomy began to develop between the two. Besides leading into the trap of anachronism, the categories of Europe and Asia are too general and fail to do justice to either the diversity within or the continuity between both areas. Vasco da Gama's arrival in South India in 1498 was not so much a dramatic ‘first contact' between two completely separate civilizations as it was a return to a world long familiar to traders, in which it did not take long to make oneself understood even in Italian or Castilian. Vasco da Gama's revolution was not like that of Christopher Columbus, the discovery of a new world, but rather the discovery of a new route leading back into the old world.

What image should we conceive of the latter? It was certainly a world of which Europe was a part, albeit on its outermost western periphery. In many ways, it was an ‘unbroken landscape', a huge Afro-Eurasian continuum that owed its unity to two binding geographical elements: the seas in the south and the savannahs in the north.^[CLXI] Chiefly due to the work of the French historian Fernand Braudel, historians have grown very much aware of the linking characteristic of seas and oceans, and because of this we can perceive not only a highly connected Mediterranean, but also an Atlantic, a Baltic and indeed, in our case, an Indian Ocean world. Logistic advantages transformed these seas into extremely important connecting arteries for transport and trade.^[CLXII] Already since at least the first century bc, extensive commercial and cultural contacts existed between the Mediterranean Sea and the western Indian Ocean, both through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. This is illustrated in the old Roman complaint about the permanent stream of precious metals flowing in the direction of India. Already during the early centuries ce, the Roman court experienced recurrent waves of fascination with the ‘East' and even a sort of Indomania.

Although much remained the same during the so-called Vasco da Gama era, there were indeed two major innovations brought by Europeans: the development of the Cape route and the European (re)discovery of America. However, initially these two factors heralded nothing more than a quantita­tive change in the ancient trading relations between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, with an ever-growing stream of precious metals flowing eastward against mainly spices and textiles flowing westward. Of course, this is just part of the story, and therefore we must not commit the mistake made by some historians who refused to detect structural change in pre-colonial ‘Asia'. To avoid the Asia-Europe dichotomy, let us first deter­mine the proper geographical categories by sketching what Braudel labelled la longue duree: the relatively unaltered climatological and geographical characteristics of the Indian Ocean region.

Indian Ocean and Arid Zone

The idea of a single world economy that connects all regions surrounding the Indian Ocean basin derives from one of Braudel's disciples, the Indian historian K. N. Chaudhuri. Taking the prevailing monsoon pattern as a starting point, he distinguished three large maritime trading circuits: (1) the Arabian Sea; (2) the Bay of Bengal; and (3) the Chinese Seas. These overlap­ping commercial zones resulted naturally from the annual rhythm of the monsoons: southwesterly winds from April to August; northeasterly winds from December to March. These winds dictated the rhythm of maritime and to a large extent also that of continental traffic. The optimal annual radius of action of shipping under these circumstances resulted in the coastal areas situated around these three seas being in closer contact with each other than any of them were with the world outside. Not surprisingly, the most important staple ports were located in the areas where these circuits over­lapped. These ports, such as Khambayat or Cambay (and later Surat, both in Gujarat), Calicut, Goa and Melaka, were the natural transhipment harbours which connected two of these maritime zones. Hence, in the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese traveller Tome Pires could speak of the ‘two arms' of Cambay: one extending westwards to Aden; the other eastwards to Melaka. What makes the case of Cambay exceptional, though, was that there was not only the sea and its immediate hinterlands, but actually a third and a fourth arm, the first stretching eastward towards South and Central India, the second northward into Hindustan and beyond to Iran and Central Asia. The combination of its relatively fertile agrarian conditions with so many sea and land routes explains the extraordinary position of the Gujarat ports as perhaps the most important trade emporia in the Indian Ocean.

Although this chapter focuses on the maritime world of the Indian Ocean and, in particular, its western and middle sections, the concept automatically evokes the importance of its continental counterpart: the great desert, savannah and steppe area which stretches from Morocco in the farthest west to the Great Wall of China in the farthest east. As with the ocean, this area, known as the Arid Zone, was an important trading artery between the continents of Africa, Europe and Asia and its logistic possibilities made it splendidly suitable for long-distance trade. Since ancient times, these rela­tively dry areas had been the home of stock-breeding and trading nomads who owned vast herds of dromedaries, Bactrian camels and, most important of all, the world's best war-horses. In addition, the warlike traditions of many of these people, whose skill as mounted archers aroused both admiration and fear, meant that the Arid Zone harboured an enormous potential in both commercial logistics and military might. Just as the coastal areas of the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, it was principally the transitional areas between these dry nomadic zones and the wetter agricultural areas which distinguished themselves as centres of economic and political vitality and dynamism.

It is no accident that the centres of the most successful large realms in Eurasia were situated either on the sea coasts - for example, Lisbon, Amster­dam, London and Istanbul - or on the fringes of the Arid Zone - for example,

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8.i Eastern hemisphere trading zones

Delhi and Beijing. Moreover, the most powerful anciens regimes - such as the Ottomans in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Safavids in Iran, the Mughals in India and the Manchus (Qing) in China - were those that were able to link the agrarian exploitation of their realm with the dynamism of both the maritime and arid frontiers. Unquestionably, their initial existence and later continuity were dependent on their ability to link these two huge commercial arteries and spheres of mobile resources with each other. The Mughals in India, for instance, managed their connections with the sea trade via Surat and their links with the arid grazing areas and caravan trade via Kabul, a logistic split between the Indian Ocean and Central Asia that reveals the crucial importance of permanent control of the road network in this empire. Hence, none of these empires should be regarded as huge, closed geographical blocks, but instead as far-flung, open networks of military and commercial routes. By dint of the services provided by military-fiscal elites, backed up by agents and bankers, it was possible to exploit the surrounding area and keep it under control. The administrative corps of these empires was anything but an ‘Oriental Despot­ism' characterized by a rigid, closed hierarchical structure, as earlier gener­ations of Western observers asserted. Its overriding character far more resembled an infinitely expandable, diffuse structure composed of overlap­ping political and fiscal rights, which was controlled to the best of its ability by an often itinerant court employing whatever fairly makeshift means came to hand. In the Indian case, this open configuration offered European and other outside powers every opportunity to enter and exploit it as active co-sharers of the realm.

Despite the continuity of ocean and savannah, within this Afro-Eurasian continuum there were certainly parts that were less integrated than others. One such area roughly corresponds to the geographical boundaries of modern Europe, which from about ad 1000 was very little or not at all influenced by the powers in the Arid Zone. From the military point of view, state-formation in this northwesternmost corner of Eurasia, what Paul Valery has called an eccentric Cap d'Asie, was dominated not by the highly man­oeuvrable warfare on horseback of nomads that predominated in the Arid Zone, but by a combination of the continual evolution of artillery and an infantry armed with firearms. This separation was not complete: Russia as well as the Ottoman Empire, both of which were increasingly taking shape as ‘European' powers, continued to keep one foot in the nomadic world. In the rest of Europe, however, beyond the natural reach of nomadic forces, the coastal areas had a relatively free hand to develop; for centuries they were also increasingly capable of severing their bonds with the continental powers. In this context, the successful Portuguese, Dutch and English resistance against the Habsburg dynasty marked a decisive victory for the sea over the land, although this was not necessarily a foregone outcome, as the violent history of the ‘maritime' Huguenots in France - ultimately defeated by the land-based forces of the French monarchy under Louis XIV - reveals.^[163] Interestingly, this success story of coastal emancipation repeated itself in the least arid, most tropical and most maritime areas of the Indian Ocean region: Ceylon (or Sri Lanka), the Indonesian archipelago and mainland Southeast Asia.

A similar autonomy was far more difficult to establish in the coastal areas of Iran, India and China, since most of these lay within the reach of the imperial cavalries and thus were less suitable to autonomous maritime developments, whether or not they were stimulated by the commercial activities of the Europeans. As a result, these areas remained at least until the eighteenth century relatively well integrated in the great continental empires. The possibility for Europeans to establish themselves as coastal powers is therefore explained by the geo-political situation in Eurasia. In the case of the empires connected to the Arid Zone, such as the Safavids, Mughals and Manchus, the European powers virtually without exception had to restrict themselves to setting up commercial offices. Here, their role was in the main restricted to that of merchant and pirate, profiting equally from the sale of spices and from the splendidly equipped politico-economic infrastructure of these empires which integrated coast with hinterland. From the outset, in these places the Europeans remained heavily dependent on the cooperation of the local authorities and above all on that of an influential group of indigenous middlemen of merchants and bankers. At the same time, the European sea-powers experienced little difficulty in carving out their niches in the Indonesian archipelago, the Malabar Coast and Ceylon. These just happened to be the production areas of the most profitable commodities on the European markets: pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. Finally, those coastal areas that were poorly or only moderately well inte­grated into their hinterlands, such as East Africa or the mainland of Southeast Asia, were far less interesting for the Europeans and were only of temporary or marginal importance to their trade. Overall, the process of European expan­sion in this period must be seen as part of a much wider Afro-Eurasian Age of Commerce which in the context of booming maritime commerce, witnesses, on the one hand, a pattern of rising maritime frontiers, and on the other hand, impressive imperial state-formation along the southern fringes of the Arid Zone.^[164] For the imperial authorities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the main challenge was to integrate the booming coasts with the political heartlands of the interior.^[165]

Rivers, canals and coasts

Rivers played a key role in connecting the political capitals near the Arid Zone to the commercial hubs along the coast. Empires could not dispense with rivers as economic lifelines, providing both transport and irrigation. The best example of this is the importance of the Ganges River, which connected the ever-expanding Bengal economy to the political centres of the Mughal emperors and their Rajput generals in the arid northwest of the subcontinent. If there was no river to connect the political and economic centres, one had to construct one, such as the Chinese Grand Canal that linked the economic powerhouse of the lower Yangzi River valley to the peripheral northern capital of Beijing.

In the case of the Ottomans, their Grand Canal, across Suez to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, never materialized, despite several plans to build it in the sixteenth century. This was compensated for by the caravan routes that connected Egypt and the Levant to Mecca and on to the port of Aden in Yemen. Despite an ongoing silting process, in the north the rivers Tigris and Euphrates complemented and further facilitated the caravan routes to the Persian Gulf. Indeed, the sixteenth-century rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire at the very crossroads of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean, and with this the creation of a monetary union of the silver akςe, raises the question of whether we should really perceive the two oceans as distinct zones. At that time, the Mediterranean and Arabian Sea were defini­tively closer to each other than the latter to the Chinese Sea. All this is confirmed by what is now perceived as a sixteenth-century Ottoman ‘Age of Exploration' in which the Turks consciously turned east to forge an anti­Portuguese alliance of Indian Ocean states that more or less acknowledged the suzerainty of the Ottoman sultan, including Mombasa on the African Coast and Aceh in the Far East. Within this alliance, Gujarat was at the forefront of Ottoman attention. Between 1538 and 1573, the port-city of Surat was governed by an uninterrupted series of Ottoman (Rumi) commanders, one of whom was Hoja Safar, alias Khudavend Khan, the leader of the Rumi community in Gujarat, who was actually from Otranto in southern Italy.^[166]

In Southeast Asia, rivers were as relevant to the process of state-formation as they were in West, South and East Asia. In mainland Southeast Asia, and to a lesser extent in Java as well, the principal political and agrarian centres at the end of the first millennium AD were not established in the deltas, which were forever subject to floods and changes in the course of the waterways, but further upstream in the interior in often semi-arid areas that were easier to reclaim. This included the ancient capitals of Pagan in Burma, Sukhothai in Siam and Angkor in Cambodia. Under ideal circumstances, the rulers stimulated agricultural expansion in the interior and maintained control of the deltas and the coastal areas downstream via the rivers. The economic centre of gravity was intensive rice cultivation, and trade was of only secondary importance. One consequence of this pattern was that very large areas, usually far from the navigable rivers, did not actually fall under the authority of the ruler. The result was a settlement pattern of relatively small, widely scattered, densely populated cultivated nuclear areas in the midst of enormous jungles, some of which were extensively exploited, others not at all. In those regions where the interior was not conducive to intensive rice cultivation, such as in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, the situation was entirely different. Here, coastal port-cities without much hinterland but with crucial transregional functions could emerge, especially at the transshipment zone between the Bay of Bengal and the Chinese Sea, where there was a long-term continuity of important entrepots: Srivijaya before our period, Melaka-Johor during it, and Singapore in the modern era.

From the fifteenth century onwards, so just before the arrival of Vasco da Gama, this pattern began to change, and the relative weight of interregional trade as a source of income for the rulers showed a marked increase. At precisely this time, as a consequence of drier climatic conditions and of the introduction of new crops and agricultural techniques, it became easier to reclaim the swampy river deltas and settle people on the land. These developments probably played an important role in the growing orientation of states towards their southern coastal areas: in Burma, Pegu became more important (until 1634), in Siam - Ayutthaya, in Cambodia - Phnom Penh, in Vietnam (albeit somewhat later) - Champa. OnJava and Ceylon, this coastal efflorescence and integration with the interior was nipped in the bud by the early seventeenth-century agression of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which left Mataram and Kandy relatively isolated states in the interior. Some other kingdoms, most important among them Burma and Japan, tried to withdraw from this new maritime dynamism by opting for rigid mercantilist control or even downright isolation. However, by the eighteenth century, exponentially growing Chinese participation in the econ­omies of the South China Sea stimulated the rise of the Southeast Asian littorals even further.

Empires

From the fifteenth century onward, arid and maritime frontier-zone empires emerged. The first is exemplified by the vast Central Asian conquests of Temur, to be followed one century later by the emergence of the great Islamic empires of Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals. The seventeenth­century rise of the Manchus in China is another example of an expanding Central Asian frontier-empire. Although conquest was relatively easy, the ability of these empires to continue depended on their capacity to link nomadic military power to the resources of the sedentary economy and to the bustling commercial outlets at the coast. In an optimal scenario, the new conquerors were able to build on the achievements of their immediate predecessors. In India, the consolidation of the sultanates in the North and even Hindu Vijayanagara in the South were very much the result of the increased power of Turkish-style cavalry armies and their techniques, but experienced great difficulties in exploiting the rich agricultural lands along the rivers and the coasts. At one of the driest areas of the subcontinent, but also along the life-giving Tungabhadra River, Vijayanagara emerged as an empire that connected India's west and east coast, partly by coercion, but chiefly through the building and patronage of huge temple-complexes in the affluent coastal regions of the Coromandel Coast. Threatened by their northern neighbours in the Deccan, the rulers of Vijayanagara were always keen to use the Portuguese merchants at Goa and other settlements on the west coast to procure war-horses in return for local commodities such as precious stones, spices and textiles. Similarly, the sultans of the Deccan could only survive when they were able to link their capitals in the dry interior to the coast. This pattern led to the emergence of new coastal emporia catering

Continuity and change in the Indian Ocean basin to the interior capitals: Cambay/Surat catering to Delhi, Chaul to Ahmadna- gar, Dabhol to Bijapur, Masulipatam to Golkonda and, indeed, Goa to Vijayanagara.

Meanwhile, in China, the Ming emperors (1368 to 1644) decided to turn their back on the nomadic world. By reconstructing the Great Canal they fully exploited the southern rice economy - the north produced mainly millet, wheat and sorghum - and with the expeditions of the Muslim admiral Zheng He (1371 to 1433), they decided to plunge into the deep sea to seriously explore the opportunities of maritime trade. Hence, in the period from 1405 to 1433, huge Chinese fleets visited the entire stretch of the Indian Ocean, from the Indonesian archipelago to Mogadishu. Apart from exploration and trade, the main aim of these expeditions was propagandistic: to claim power and demand tribute by demonstrating China's superiority. Although this active maritime engagement came to an early close in part due to some ongoing worries about traders turning into pirates, in the sixteenth century Ming China developed into a highly commercialized and outward-oriented society. Trade with the outside world was not forbidden, but regulated at earmarked outlets such as Macau, which the Portuguese were allowed to lease in 1557. China's sixteenth-century turn to the coast was further enhanced by the opening up of the Pacific Ocean following the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, which brought huge amounts of South American silver, but also new crops like maize, tobacco and sweet potatoes. Together with imports from Japan, these stimulated the Chinese economy, in particu­lar along the southeast coast in the previously unsettled hill areas of Fujian. The demographic upsurge that followed made possible the migration of many Chinese from this region to Southeast Asia. Here, under Spanish and Dutch supervision, they created an informal Chinese empire, developing places like Manila (from 1571), Batavia (from 1621) and Taiwan (from 1624), but still remaining connected to their homeland.

In the seventeenth century, even stronger and larger empires developed in much of Eurasia. The explanation for this has been sought in the introduc­tion of new gunpowder technology, but the military mainstay of all these powers remained the war-horse, albeit less so for the Ottomans. Especially in the case of the two wealthiest empires, those of the Mughals and the Manchus, their unprecedented capacity to combine Central Eurasian military recruitment, agrarian exploitation and maritime trade was more important than simple military superiority. Although it was helped by the favourable infrastructure of the Ganges River and the Great Canal, their expansion could only be implemented by the importation of massive amounts of gold

and particular silver from the New World. Of course, the Indian sultans - including the ruler of Vijayanagara, known as the ‘sultan among hindu kings' - and the Ming emperors had shown the way, but they had struggled to pay for their huge armies by taking recourse to tinkering policies like issuing paper money or sheer plunder. By contrast, the Mughals and the Manchus were now able to raise more cash to pay for a more professional administrative and military apparatus to oversee increasing agricultural exploitation. One of the major consequences of this process was political integration, as illustrated in the rise of the imperial port-cities of Surat and Canton (Guangzhou) as the two major maritime outlets and trading hubs of the Indian Ocean.

Companies

The rise of the European powers in the Indian Ocean is part of the wider process of emerging littoral societies which embraced the entire Eurasian continent. Whereas in the areas surrounding the Arid Zone empires were able to retake control of the new maritime dynamic, in peripheries like Western Europe and Southeast Asia, the mercantile elites of the coastal states were in a position to take their fate into their own hands. Before Vasco da Gama's trip around the Cape, the lion's share of the European trade with the Indian Ocean was in the hands of the Italian city-states, Venice in particular, which had already used their extensive Mediterranean network to the Levant to keep the Holy Roman Empire and France at a safe distance. The trading world of the Mediterranean was conveniently linked to that of the Indian Ocean by the so-called funduq (Arabic) or fondaco (Italian), an extraterritorial enclave consisting of an inn or warehouse that catered to foreign merchants and protected their merchandise. Funduqs greatly facilitated the further spread of European merchant communities into the Indian Ocean.^[167]

The Italian city-states developed business procedures that have been described as early capitalism, although this was already business as usual in Asian port-cities such as Cambay, Calicut and Zayton. Ongoing commercial competition among the Italian cities, combined with their dependence on the Ottoman Empire for gaining access to the East, made these urban republics eager to explore alternative routes further south- and westward. As early as the thirteenth century, Genoa had dreamed of a direct route to the Indies, and Genoese merchants and mariners were active in many maritime ventures. Among these were those sponsored first by Portugal and then by Spain.

Situated at the crossroads of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Portuguese kings embraced the opportunities provided by their geographic position to carve out what seemed to be a truly global empire on the coastal rim of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Although very much a Portuguese achievement, this would hardly have been possible without the considerable contributions of Italian, German and Dutch investors; indeed, Lisbon's Age was also the Age of Antwerp and Genoa, the latter maintaining the connec­tion with American silver gained through Spanish asientos^[168]

More than was the case with the great empires of the Indian Ocean, those of Europe were increasingly dominated by the financial elites of the port­towns on the coast. Nonetheless, even the most sea-oriented of them, the Portuguese Empire, was not run by merchants, but by admirals and officials. Its kings contented themselves with taxing and farming out the routes and sales they could control through the threat or actual deliverance of violence. Sea trade had often involved violence, but the sheer effectiveness of more cannon on stronger ships was unprecedented and gave the Portuguese Estado da India the edge on the high seas of the Indian Ocean. The bulk of the intra­Asian trade, however, was left to their mostly Asian competitors and also increasingly to private Portuguese settlers (casados), many of whom were converted Jews known as ‘New Christians', who often intermarried with local women. They were based at their own port-cities in the Arabian Seas such as Diu, Goa, Colombo and Cochin, but also in areas beyond the reach of the Estado, such as in the swampy borderlands between Pegu and Bengal. Two of them - Filipe de Brito and Sebastiao Gongalves Tibau - emerged as powerful warlords who even managed to carve out their own principalities. Despite the decline of official Portuguese trade in the first decades of the seventeenth century, private intra-Asian trade continued to support the largely flourishing Luso-Asian communities in India and China deep into the eighteenth century.^[169]

The best way to achieve coastal autonomy was the formation of a mercantile organization that could operate independently from the dynastic and territorial concerns of the polity in which the coast was located, with the exclusive aim of making profit elsewhere and distributing it to the investors back home. The establishment of the English (1600) and Dutch (1602) joint­stock East India Companies confirmed the rising power of the mercantile elites of the northwestern European littoral and gave them a highly effective instrument to expand that power even further along the coastal rim of the Indian Ocean. During the seventeenth century, the Dutch were by far the most successful in this respect, but only conquered those coastal and island territories which produced commodities that could easily be monopolized - hence the VOC's early aggression against the spice islands in the eastern Indonesian archipelago (cloves, nutmegs and mace) and Ceylon (cinnamon). At the same time, both the English and the Dutch tried to wipe out Iberian competition as quickly as possible, and turned their eyes to the main Portuguese strongholds. The English conquered Bandar-e Abbas in 1622 (with the help of the Safavids) and the Dutch conquered Melaka in 1641 (with the help of Johor). At this stage, the English lacked the capital to keep pace with the Dutch. The latter more or less forced the English to focus their investments on the Indian subcontinent, which at that time was not at all the most desired prize. Here the European companies were faced with the military superiority of the Mughals and, as had the Venetians earlier in the Ottoman Empire, they were quite happy to use the protection and the sophisticated trading and credit facilities - funduqs, markets, banks, mints, roads, insurance, bills of exchange, etc. - provided, often through contract, by the Mughal Empire.

The company as an institution was a highly successful phenomenon in the Indian Ocean: after the Dutch and English had shown the way, most other European countries followed suit. What was new was the pooling and securing of large amounts of capital for the long term as business risk was spread through shareholders. As a result, the company could build and maintain elaborate infrastructures from a great distance, predict and ‘internal­ize' protection costs, and impose monopolies or design other more effective market policies.¹⁰ Although they were certainly innovative, companies could only survive because at crucial moments they were backed up by their states, which were often ruled by the very same families that managed the

10 Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution in the Seventeenth Century: The East India Company and the Decline of the Caravan Trade (University of Chicago Press, 1974).

Continuity and change in the Indian Ocean basin companies. Much more than was the case with the other trading networks of the Indian Ocean, European states frequently intervened in company affairs, providing additional protection and reducing overheads. The company as an institution was a wonderful instrument to operate against great risks and at a great distance. It worked particularly well for the richest merchants in Amsterdam and London in already sophisticated market economies such as those of the Indian Ocean.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, due to the conquests of the main production and trading centres, the VOC managed to impose a mon­opoly on cloves, nutmeg and mace which also virtually excluded the trad­itional trading circuits from access to the Spice Islands. This important shift in the trade with and within the Indonesian archipelago brought an early end to its Age of Commerce and actually precluded the political integration of coast and hinterland as experienced in the Middle East, Iran, India and China. For most areas west and north of the archipelago, however - with the exception of the islands of Ceylon and Taiwan - relatively few visible changes came from any ‘innovative' behaviour or institutions of the Euro­pean companies.

Like the Portuguese before them, the companies had to adapt themselves to the existing trading pattern in the Indian Ocean, although in trading their monopoly products, they managed to circumvent these to some degree. For example, after 1611, Dutch ships were able to skirt around the whole system by sailing with the prevailing westerly winds around 40 degrees South Latitude after leaving the Cape and then using the southeast trade winds to reach the Sunda Strait. The Dutch thus built up their own interregional circuit parallel to the existing routes. In the seventeenth century, Batavia emerged as a new Southeast Asian rendezvous, offering an alternative port to such existing regional centres as Malacca and Bantam. From Batavia, a new trade system of bilateral long-distance relations developed, which infringed on important sections of the existing pattern. Japanese copper was brought to the market in Surat and fine spices were sold in Persia via Batavia. At the same time, though, the existing Asian trading pattern was hardly subjected to change; the VOC was simply making use of the existing intra-Asian market relations. The difference it brought to the Indian Ocean was that there was now this one sole trading organization that was willing and able to undertake transportation over the whole route from production centre to market, covering more than two circuits. Nevertheless, it would be too much to claim that this was an absolute innovation because, prior to 1600, this practice had already been prevalent among the Portuguese and even among the

Armenian and Indian trading communities scattered throughout the region, albeit on a much more limited scale and with far less bureaucracy involved.

One long-neglected contribution of the VOC to the Indian Ocean trading world was the creation of a new southern zone of forced migration which actually connected the already existing slave-trading networks of the East African Swahili coast with those of South and Southeast Asia. Although the volume of the slave trade in the Indian Ocean never reached the scale of the Atlantic - approximately half a million people as opposed to 12 million - about half the population in the VOC port-cities consisted of resident slaves, arriving at a total figure of 66,350 slaves for the years 1687 to 1688. Although the VOC itself traded a considerable number of slaves, most were purchased through existing trading networks. In contrast to the more agrarian slavery of the Atlantic, most slaves in Dutch Asia were used in smaller numbers per household for mostly domestic services in an urban context. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this southern slave trade expanded massively as a result of the new plantation economies of the French Mascarene Islands, where the slave population more than tripled from c. 40,000 in 1766 to 133,000 in 1808.^[CLXX] Parallel to the slave trade, another much smaller south-south circuit of forced migration emerged under VOC control, consisting of convicts and exiles, mostly from the Indonesian archipelago, who ended up in Ceylon and the Cape.¹²

Although this is sometimes over-emphasized, the Dutch colonial establish­ments in the Indian Ocean seem to have been more segmented than the Portuguese ones. Rather than the broad Lusitanian middle-ground consisting primarily of Eurasian casados, the Dutch engineered a more layered society that in theory ranged from European Christians to Eurasians, Christian client communities and freed slaves (for example, the so-called Mardijkers, Topasses and Free Blacks), non-Christian but free ‘foreign' groups (for example, Chinese), slaves and finally the local people. However, because Dutch law was not imposed on local communities, but was rather constantly renegotiated with them, actual colonial practice often looked very different.¹³

During the mid-eighteenth century, the great days of the companies gave way to the British country trader who by now, like his Asian counterpart, could operate more flexibly and with lower costs. At the same time, he could still count on the protection and infrastructure provided by the East India Company. The latter had gradually developed from a maritime trading insti­tution into a devastating war machine on land; it was paid not by profit, but by the spoils of war. At the same time, the Dutch spice monopoly was main­tained, but spices had lost much of their appeal as luxury goods. Far more attractive now were Indian commodities, particularly textiles and opium, as these could be used more profitably to exploit the Chinese - in particular in exchange for tea and porcelain - and various other markets in the Indian Ocean and even beyond, in the slave trade along the West African coast.

Meanwhile, on the Indian mainland, the military balance started to change. From the middle of the eighteenth century onward, larger and better drilled and equipped British and French sepoy armies proved able to with­stand the cavalry-based armies of the Mughals and their successors. As in the earlier cases of Dutch Java and Ceylon, this first engendered the coasts' breaking away, soon followed by further integration from coasts that were now completely dominated by the new colonial headquarters of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Nevertheless, in many other parts of the Indian Ocean, the Europeans were still playing second fiddle; tried and tested trading networks like those of various Arab, Indian, Chinese, Jewish or Armenian groups, but also relatively new ones like that of the Buginese in the Indones­ian archipelago, held sway deep into the eighteenth century, and in some places long after.

Asian trade networks

The Asian merchants were not organized in companies, but mostly in family firms. Some of these firms participated in transregional trade networks that were based on the mutual trust of partners with a common ethnic, religious or caste background and which made them stand out from the majority of the population of the regions where they traded. Like the European com­panies, some of these ‘trade diasporas' could count on the support of their political patrons. For example, the Armenian trade network started as a local enterprise along the Ottoman-Safavid border that profited from increasing European demand for Iranian silk. After 1605, when the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas relocated the Armenians to New Julfa at the outskirts of his new capital of Isfahan, they started to develop a huge trading network spanning the Mediterranean, the entire Indian Ocean and even beyond to Russia, the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It seems that through various formal and informal means, all the nodes in the network were connected and subordin­ated to the centre in New Julfa. At the very basis of the network stood the commenda partnership, in which a settled ‘capitalist' provided the capital or commodities to his agent who would supply his labour by travelling on his master's behalf to distant markets and putting the entrusted capital or goods to use by investing it on behalf of the partnership. The profit coming out of the joint venture was divided between the master and his agent. Although the commenda was open-ended in principle, in the Armenian case the inner circle of partners were all part of an extended family of sons, brothers and cousins under the direction of a senior family member residing in NewJulfa. Beyond this inner circle, there was a ‘coalition' of other Armenian agents whose conduct was monitored and enforced, since they were also linked to other Armenian families in New Julfa.

Although most of the other Asian trading networks in the Indian Ocean were not based on a single nodal centre, all of them functioned on the basis of the family firm, using commenda or some other flexible form of partnership such as the commission agency, which tended to be a short-term, less personal contract that included partners beyond the inner circle of kin or even the ethnic-religious denomination.¹⁴ Many of these Asian trade net­works were entangled with the political authorities that patronized them or were supported by them as much as the European companies were. The courts of Southeast Asia, including that of the VOC High government in Batavia, were highly mercantilist and deeply involved in trade activities; many of these rulers were the country's prime merchants themselves, often imposing monopolies on the foremost commodities in their realms. For the various coastal city-states of the Malay world, which lacked substantial hinterlands, interregional trade was the sine qua non of state-formation. Although some Southeast Asian states supported indigenous mercantile groups (orang kaya), the bulk of the external trade was in the hands of minorities who lived in separate quarters with their own chiefs but appointed by the state. Some of them were allowed to gain major political responsi­bilities such as harbour master (shahbandar) or financial minister (phraklang in Siam). Obviously, their minority status was supposed to prevent these

1 ⁴ Sebouh David Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), pp. 215-34.

Continuity and change in the Indian Ocean basin groups from taking power, but this did not always happen. Apart from the well-known Dutch case, the eighteenth-century expansion of the Buginese serves as another example of what could happen if trade networks were allowed too much leeway. Although the Dutch had imposed their spice monopoly on them and threatened their home-base in Celebes, the Buginese managed to expand over the Malay waters and to establish themselves as the ruling power in Kelang, Lingga, Selangor and Johor.

In the smaller principalities of South India, the situation was not really different, as long-distance maritime trade was dominated by ethnic or reli­gious minorities such as Jews, Armenians, Mappila or Maraikkayar Muslims, or specific caste-groups such as Chetties and Chulias. Especially the latter two groups were perfectly situated to connect the ports of the Indian Ocean to the temples and markets of the interior. All of these groups operated beyond the grip of the main empires. They behaved very much like ‘portfolio­capitalists' for whom the boundaries between trading, agricultural exploit­ation and politics were extremely porous.¹⁵ However, with only a few exceptions - such as the Ali Rajas of Cannanore, the Zheng ‘pirates' of Amoy and indeed the Buginese - maritime traders hardly ever became full-fledged territorial rulers.

Although they may have taken a rather aloof public attitude towards trade, the rulers of the big Asian empires were pretty much aware that, through the cash-nexus, trade affected the ability to collect land revenue and to pay salaries. While the Ottomans exploited Christian and Jewish trading minor­ities through their millet system, the Safavids forcefully settled the Armenian trading community in New Julfa. In the late sixteenth century, Iranian merchants played a vital role in connecting Iran to the Bay of Bengal through Masulipatam, the newly emerging maritime outlet of the Golconda sultan­ate.¹⁶ From the mid-seventeenth century, however, connections beyond the Arabian Sea became increasingly dominated by Arab and South Indian merchants. The Mughal Empire was well served by various trading commu­nities consisting of both foreign - mainly Europeans, Armenians and Turks - as well as indigenous groups - mainly Indian Muslims, Banias, Parsis and Jains.

1 ⁵ Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio Capitalists and the Political Economy of Early Modern India', Indian Economic and Social History Review 25 (1988), 401-24.

¹⁶ For the Iranian connections across the Indian Ocean World, see Sanjay Subrahma- nyam, ‘Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean 1590-1665', Modern Asian Studies 22 (1988), 503-30 and ‘Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and the Early Modern State Formation', Journal of Asian Studies 51 (1992), 340-62.

The emperors often preferred a laissez-faire approach towards Indian Ocean trade, not because they were less interested, but because they could afford such a policy. Thanks to the structural trade surplus of India, they simply had to tax in- and outgoing trade flows at the main imperial gateways in Gujarat and Bengal.

By far the most important commercial hub that connected Mughal India to the outside world was the port-city of Cambay, during the sixteenth century, to be followed by Surat during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Although Gujarati traders had dominated the Indian trade to Southeast Asia, due to Dutch aggression in the archipelago their role substantially dimin­ished after the mid-seventeenth century. However, in the eighteenth cen­tury, Gujarati traders became increasingly prominent in the western Indian Ocean, in particular in the Red Sea and along the African coast. Meanwhile, the connections of the Arabian Sea with the archipelago were taken over by mercantile groups from the Hadhramaut and South India. Through the Siamese ports of Mergui-Tenasserim and Junk Ceylon (Ujang Selang/ Phuket), they could skip the Dutch ports to trade with Aceh and the newly assertive sultanates of eastern Sumatra, including Palembang, Siak and Indragiri. Moreover, many mercantile communities from the Minangkabau proliferated along the east coast of Sumatra, but also in Naning, Rembau and Sungai Ujong on the Malay Peninsula. From these strongholds, they increas­ingly mingled into the politics of neighbouring polities such as Perak, Kedah and Johore. As indicated already, here they found themselves in the midst of tremendously expanding Buginese and Chinese trading networks.

In contrast to the Indian empires, the Chinese ones upheld a long tradition in which merchants were distrusted and trade was closely supervised. As we have seen already, their involvement with the Indian Ocean was rather ambivalent. In the sixteenth century, the Chinese themselves referred to the Nanyang, a Chinese ‘Southern Ocean', which at that time was encircled by an eastern and a western trading route. The western route (Hsi Yang) ran to Java via Champa, Cambodia, Siam, the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra; its eastern counterpart (Tung Yang) went through the Philippines, the Sulu Archipelago and Celebes to the Moluccas. Japan does not feature on the list because trade to this island empire was banned by the Chinese Government for most of the sixteenth century.

In this period, the Spaniards - who had managed to ensconce themselves in the Philippines and the Moluccas - were the predominant European power along the eastern route, whereas the Portuguese succeeded in making themselves masters of a number of key positions along the western route, such as Melaka and Macau. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese share in the lucrative China trade was gradually taken over by the Dutch and the English. Nevertheless, in contrast to the situation in those areas where the VOC could actually exercise political control, in most of the western Nanyang Dutch undertakings were completely overshadowed by the Chinese economy, particularly when that economy embarked on yet another exceptional growth spurt at the end of the seventeenth century. Purely and simply on account of its size, the Chinese economy tended to dominate Southeast Asia. In the era of the Company, Southeast Asia, including the Indonesian archipelago, was home to an estimated 20 to 30 million inhabit­ants, about the same as Japan, but China had roughly ten times that number of inhabitants! Thus, the orientation towards China throughout this region as a whole reflected contemporary demographic realities. In the eighteenth century, especially, the effect of this Chinese world economy increased exponentially. Because the Malay Peninsula and the islands of the East Indies were both being drawn increasingly into the orbit of the VOC, mainland Southeast Asia in particular felt the effects of this growth.

However attractive participation in the burgeoning China trade might have been for the surrounding kingdoms, it always held the ever-present threat of being overwhelmed by an influx of Chinese immigrants, eventually causing the loss of domestic political control. In Japan, matters were compli­cated by the shogunate which was constantly assailed by fears that the growing trade with China could lead to an unstaunchable draining away of the domestic supplies of precious metals. In colonial trade centres such as Batavia and Manila, the waxing economic power of China was viewed by the authorities as less of a threat, and throughout the eighteenth century Chinese traders continued to be largely welcome to offer their goods and services locally. As with the other political regimes of Southeast Asia, colonial centres could hardly dispense with Chinese expertise and manpower to work the expanding new plantations and mines of the region. However, as pogroms in various cities in which many Chinese were killed bear witness (six in Manila, one in Batavia), Sinophobia could also suddenly rear its ugly head. This was actually a sign that in those areas, too, the economy had gradually become dependent on the swelling group of Chinese immigrants. Although the Chinese were increasingly running the economies of Southeast Asia, they were neither directed by the Qing authorities nor did they organize them­selves effectively beyond the region of their settlement.

To end this section on political and commercial networks, let us briefly recap the impact of the European operations in the Indian Ocean as a whole. Although the Asian trading networks in the Indian Ocean were negatively affected by the European presence in the Indonesian archipelago in particu­lar, they were able to adjust themselves quite well, even to a point where they were able to exploit the new conditions. For example, Gujarati and Sindi traders left the eastern Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century, to make room for Dutch, British, Arab and South Indian competitors, only to become increasingly prominent in the western Indian Ocean in the eighteenth cen­tury. In a way, this reconfirmed the old triple segmentation of the Indian Ocean in which Arab merchants, from both the Hadhramaut and the south­ern Persian Gulf, increasingly dominated the western, South Indians the middle, and the Chinese the eastern section of the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the European companies and private traders penetrated all three zones, but focused in particular on the easily colonized southern, tropical fringes which included the plantations of the French Mascarene Islands, Ceylon and the Indonesian archipelago. In the end, the British proved most successful as they were best situated to use the Indian subcontinent as a bridgehead to open direct trade with China.

More important than the phenomenon of European expansion was the expansion of the great Islamic empires which through networks of rivers and roads connected the already flourishing coasts to ever deeper and better- cultivated hinterlands. All this was achieved thanks to the service of various transregional trading communities which, apart from their core business of trade and transport, operated the imperial cash-nexus through a sophisticated system of mints, banks and other credit facilities. Hence, the financial support of these same communities, many of them ethnic or religious minorities, often became the key to shifting power relationships, as is famously demonstrated by the support provided by the Jagath Seth banking family of the British conquest of Bengal. The aftermath of this conquest in the nineteenth century shows how the Indian Ocean littoral became so economically and demograph- ically heavy that it could no longer be controlled from the interior. With the help of new and more sophisticated techniques of military and economic exploitation, the Europeans were now able to turn the tables to start domin­ating the interior from their rapidly expanding coastal urban enclaves.

Cosmopolis

The political and trading networks of the Indian Ocean provided the basic infrastructure for the circulation of ideas in the region. Obviously these ideas were communicated through human agents: traders, sailors, soldiers, pilgrims, artists and many other travellers who, attracted by various financial and spiritual incentives, frequented the various ports, camps and courts of the Indian Ocean. Recently, though, scholars are beginning to pay more attention to written texts as equally important transmitters of ideas. Still, before printing technology started to have an impact on the societies of the Indian Ocean, texts were written, read out, compiled, copied, translated and, crucially, often considerably adjusted to meet the imagination of an audience with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. These same scholars have detected what they have called a Sanskrit and an Arabic cosmopolis, the latter following the first, but both of them connecting the linguistic environments of South and Southeast Asia.¹⁷ Both Sanskrit and Arabic represent a highly cosmopolitan language, a ‘metamode of discourse' in which well-known stories are shared by the various local communities that actively participate in the making of the discourse by constantly creating their own vernacular versions of it. An earlier generation of scholars would have analysed this phenomenon under the heading of civilization, religion or great tradition, and hence would have used terms like indianization, islami(ci)zation or ‘little tradition' to study their dissemination and adaptation. More recently, social scientists would have described the process with the two container concepts of globalization and glocalization, the latter a word that emerged first in business jargon to describe adapting a global product for local conditions or culture. The term ‘cosmopolis' has an advantage over these, however, in that it is open-ended and does not posit a clear centre from which influences are diffused. Hence, it does not privilege authenticity, but recognizes an ongoing, multi-centric dynamic of diffusion and regional acculturation affecting both form and contents. As this meta-discourse involves shared values and ideas, a cosmopolis is much more than just a linguistic sphere, but also includes literature, religion, ethics and knowledge. Obviously, Arabic, considered to be God's own perfect tongue, possessed a unique status among languages. Although clearly linked to Islam, the Arabic cosmopolis spread much beyond the community of Muslim believers. Actually, Arabic texts spanned the literary worlds of Islamic and non-Islamic West, South and Southeast Asia, with deep effects on the contents and language of Tamil, Malay and Javanese discourse.

1 ⁷ Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2006); and Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

At the end of our period, this literary 'Arabicized' cosmopolis stretched from Morocco to the Philippines. It overshadowed not only the old Sanskrit cosmopolis, but also the encroaching but still very much secluded Chinese and European cosmopolises. In the Indian Ocean, it had spread mostly along the more southern littorals of South and Southeast Asia. From there, it often followed the plough into the freshly cultivated and islamicized interiors of eastern Bengal, Java and Sumatra.¹⁸ Its agents were often cosmopolitan figures who combined an identity of trader, religious scholar and Sufi. An increasing number of them followed the Shafi‘i school of law, were connected to Hadhrami or other Arabic Sufi brotherhoods (tariqaj, and considered Mecca the heart of their world, to which they should at least once go on pilgrimage. During our period, this southern, sea-oriented cosmopolis flourished in the interstices of the encroaching European powers. It actually gained status by a pronounced discourse of resistance (in Arabic, jihad) which became particu­larly prominent during moments of intense conflict such as among the Mappilas against the Portuguese in the mid-sixteenth century and among the Javanese against the Dutch at the end of the seventeenth century.

Due to the spread and further intensification of the Arabic cosmopolis in Southeast Asia, Persian as the classical language of the Islamic courtly society lost some of its ground. Of course, Arabic considerably overlapped with a sphere that we may call the Turko-Persian ecumene, or indeed cosmopolis, which dominated the continental courts of West, Central and South Asia ruled by Sufi-oriented Turkish warrior elites. Not being the prime language of religious discourse, Persian was the language par excellence of political wisdom and good manners (adab; akhlaq). Its non-sectarian and liberal features matched the vision of universal empire and made it an ideal forum through which ‘foreign' conquerors like the Mughals could effectively nego­tiate the enormous diversity of Indian society.

The Arabic and Turko-Persian cosmopolises overlapped almost every­where but converged most fruitfully away from their imagined epicentres in Arabia and Iran, on the Indian subcontinent where both had started to participate in the ongoing production of the old Sanskrit cosmopolis. From the mid-sixteenth century until the end of the eighteenth century, it was this tripartite confrontation of Sanskrit, Turko-Persian and Arabic cosmopolises which created a unique South Asian engagement with other cultures as well

1 ⁸ Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993); and Denys Lombard, Le Carrefourjavanais, 3 vols (Paris: EHESS, 1990).

Continuity and change in the Indian Ocean basin as concern for one's own agency and identity. As a result, more than others, Indian religious scholars were involved in fierce theological debates about the monism (wahdat al wujud) of the Ibero-Arab scholar Ibn Arabi (1165 to 1240), in which they discussed to what extent observation could be accom­modated by Islamic episteme. Increasingly so, the works of North Indian ‘ulama and Sufis were at the heart of the theological discourse that raged both in the Arabic world, including Mecca, and, through Hadhramauti and other Arabic channels, in the Indonesian archipelago.

Apart from being at the front of cultural dialogues, the increasingly prominent place of Indians in the Arabic cosmopolis can also be explained by pointing towards India's growing political and economic clout during Mughal rule. For example, from Emperor Akbar (r. 1556 to 1605) onwards, influence at Mecca was bought by distributing enormous quantities of money and sumptuous gifts for both the dignitaries and the poor. At the same time, increasing numbers of Arab Sufi brotherhoods set up their hospices on the Indian subcontinent, as this would enable them to channel profits from the India trade into various waqf foundations back home; one example is provided by the Aydarus family from the Hadhramaut.¹⁹ In many of these cases, commercial and religious networks conveniently sustained each other and both point towards an expanding and highly dynamic Arabic cosmopolis characterized by increasing mobility, interaction and dialogue, within and beyond the cosmopolis. Although direct Persian and North Indian contacts with Southeast Asia declined during the seventeenth century, Persian and, in particular, Indian voices continued to have a major impact on the region, albeit now mainly through Arabic channels and mainly on theological issues. Meanwhile, as it was spreading, the Arabic cosmopolis itself became less Arabic as it was heavily vernacularized in all the local languages that it touched, from Swahili on the African coast to Javanese in the Indonesian archipelago.

Although the Arabic cosmopolis was the most prominent one in the western and central sections of the Indian Ocean, it was certainly not the only one, and some areas were hardly affected by it at all. Obviously, on its western fringe, the Ottoman Empire was very much a participant. Especially during the sixteenth century when the Ottomans increasingly looked East

1 ⁹ Esther Peskes, Al-Aidarus und seine Erben: Eine Untersuchung zu Geschichte und Sufismus einer Hadramitischen Sada-gruppe vom funfzehnten bis zum achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Stutt­gart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005). See also Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).

and many rulers of the Indian Ocean acknowledged their suzerainty, there was an upsurge of writings which assimilated Turkish exploration with already existing Arabic knowledge of the Indian Ocean. Later, during the late sixteenth and seventeenth century, the Turkish cosmopolis remained closely associated with Arabic as it continued to patronize and control the Hajj. At the same time, however, Persian and Indian influences declined as the Ottomans increasingly turned West.

At this early stage, the Western - or should we say Latin - cosmopolis itself hardly had an impact on the Indian Ocean, although it affected the world views of some elites, including artists and intellectuals at the various courts, and a little sometimes trickled down to other parts of the society. Actually, the Western cosmopolis was much more strongly affected by the cosmopolises of the Indian Ocean than vice versa, which, similar to the Indian case, gave rise to deep epistemological rethinking and fierce theo­logical debates. Obviously, in scarcely populated areas that were colonized early, there was, indeed, a deep colonial impact through slavery, forced migration and conversion. In the Portuguese establishments and French slave colonies, widespread creolization occurred in which the indigenous population and migrants quickly shed their mother tongues for European languages and various Creole speeches, and, by doing so, constructed new identities for themselves.^[171] At the same time, Portuguese retained its position as the lingua franca of the Indian Ocean port-towns.

More or less parallel to the north-south Arabo-Indian networks of the Arabian Sea and as such crossing the east-west Arabo-Indonesian networks linking the Bay of Bengal, we may detect a still vibrant Pali cosmopolis or imaginair. This encompassed Sri Lanka and much of mainland Southeast Asia where, from the early second millennium onward, it also became widely disseminated among the peasantry. Taking Pali as the prestige language for textual embodiments of ideology meant that people privileged Sinhalese monastic lineages and a relatively unchanging canon of Pali texts and Theravada-Buddhist thoughts.^[172] It remains to be seen, though, to what extent the various centres of this cosmopolis were able to communicate with each other and with the other cosmopolises. We know, for example, that during the eighteenth century Dutch ships transported monks from Arakan and

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Siam in order to let them revive the Sinhalese Sangha. Somewhat earlier, there were still a substantial number of Iranian and other Muslim traders on the mainland who gained a great deal of influence at the Siamese court and even gave rise to the short-lived mid-seventeenth-century sultanates of Champa and Cambodia. But it was only at the court of Arakan that we may perceive in the works of the Bengali poet Alaol something of a true dialogue between the Sanskrit, the Turko-Persian and perhaps even the Buddhist cosmopolis of his patron.^[173] Even more than the Buddhist cosmop­olis, the Neo-Confucian (or Chinese) cosmopolis of the most eastern section of the Indian Ocean was hardly influenced by the Arabic cosmopolis, partly because it was seen as an officially approved canon of scholarly and literary works. More than the others of the Indian Ocean, this cosmopolis was supervised closely by the state and, as such, was reproduced by the courtly literati of the Chinese Empire and the states which shared its Confucian tradition: Korea, Japan and Vietnam. If Islamic voices penetrated their world, it was like Buddhism earlier, more through Central Asia than through the South China Sea.

Epilogue

During the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the people of the countries surrounding the Indian Ocean witnessed unprecedented interaction. More than ever before, new Asian empires, European companies and Asian trade networks generated a new Age of Commerce, very much facilitated by the bullion of the New World arriving through the Levant, the Cape and the Pacific. During this period, the triple segmentation of the Indian Ocean was strengthened as the north-south connections within the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the South China Sea began to supersede the east-west ones via the Indian subcontinent. At the same time, European traders and companies were the first to exploit the two most lucrative direct linkages: first, from the Indian Ocean to Europe and, second, from India to China. So, despite ongoing segmentation, both European companies and Asian trade networks continued to span the entire Indian Ocean. In fact, the arrival of the Europeans widened the reach of the Indian Ocean world to further integrate an already connected world that now not only encompassed the Mediterra­nean, but also the Atlantic. This further expansion of the Indian Ocean into Europe was visible in many ways as it had a huge impact on consumer behaviour, production processes and, most importantly, world views. Although the latter can be seen as a side-product of growing commercial interaction, it was also the outcome of increasing cultural interaction which sparked a phase of enormous creativity in which people began to rethink their own origins and identities in the light of an endless stream of new knowledge. Although we may label this process with familiar terms like Renaissance or Enlightenment, we should bear in mind that it was a global phenomenon, most prominently so in those regions and times where people experienced rapid convergence of great cultural diversity, be it through migration, conquest or trade. In other words, globalization always and everywhere engendered glocalization, a process that was mediated through the various cosmopolises of the Indian Ocean and was at its most creative along the various inner and outer boundaries of these cosmopolises.

FURTHER READING

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Boyajian, James, Portuguese Trade in Asia under the Habsburgs, 1580-1640 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

Casale, Giancarlo, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2010).

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